Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York City in 1862; she had
two older brothers. Her elite family belonged to "old New York,"
lived in a large and fancy brownstone, and often visited the aristocratic
countryside and Europe. As a child, Edith was educated by tutors and became
an eager student. She was taught French, German, Italian, and classic
literature. Although she was shy, she was raised to be a lady and forced
to become a debutante. In 1885 she married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Bostonian
who lived off his large inheritance. The couple resided in New York amongst
the elite society and traveled regularly to Newport and Europe. Edith,
however, found the social scene harrowing and hypocritical. As a result,
most of her fiction is about New York society and the crushing hypocrisy
of its conventions. Her sharp wit and biting satire attracted the reading
public.

Edith was always an author, writing in her youth, throughout her marriage,
and during the nervous illnesses that haunted both her husband and herself.
At sixteen, she had privately published a first book of poems. Her first
full-length book, The Decoration of Houses, was a collaborative
effort published in 1897. Two years later, she published a volume of short
stories called The Greater Inclination. Her first significant novel,
The Valley of Decision, was published in 1902. The House of
Mirth (1905) chronicles the social misfortunes of Lily Bart and is
said to be Wharton's most autobiographical work; it met with popular success.

Edith's popularity put a strain on her marriage, for her husband did
not like being in the background. His emotional and physical health deteriorated,
and the couple spent long periods in Europe, where Edward underwent therapy.
Finally in 1907, the Whartons moved to Paris, where he had a complete
nervous breakdown three years later. In 1913, Edith divorced Edward and
continued to live in Europe, where she became friends with the novelist
Henry James.

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In spite of Edward's failing health and her marital problems, Edith
continued to write and publish; her works included essays, travel books,
novels, and collections of short stories and verse. In 1907, she published
The Fruit of the Tree, whose plot and characters foreshadow Ethan
Frome, which was published in 1911. When World War I broke out in
1914, Edith, still living in France, was an active volunteer for various
efforts helping the wounded and the orphans. For her contributions, she
was awarded the French Legion of Honor. After the war, Edith made France
her permanent home. To support her expensive lifestyle there, she published
several novels in serial form for popular magazines; these included The
Mother's Recompense (1925) and Twilight Sleep (1927).

Wharton's novel, The Age of Innocence, won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1921. In 1923, she was given an honorary degree from Yale University.
In the 1930s she was elected to both the National Institute of Arts and
Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She continued to
write and publish throughout this period. When she died in 1937 from a
stroke, she was in the process of writing The Buccaneers, which
was published after her death. Edith Wharton is now judged to be a powerful
writer who successfully captured and criticized the nature of the stodgy
upper class of society.

LITERARY/HISTORICAL INFORMATION

Ethan Frome, published in 1911, was written in one of the tragic
periods of Wharton's life. She was living in Paris and watching her husband
deteriorate into total mental illness. It is no small wonder that the
novel is so bleak. It is also quite a departure for Edith Wharton, except
for the fact that it portrays marriage as a tragic imprisonment. The main
characters of this story are poor rural New Englanders, not her usual
New York socialites. In another bold departure from her standard style,
Edith Wharton wrote an introduction for the book, wherein she explains
her authorial choices. She wanted to write about New England as she saw
it, "harsh and beautiful." Most of her comments, however, address
the structure of the story and how she decided to write the plot as a
set of revealed bits of gossip in the outer frame, juxtaposed with the
more standard central story. She thought of the tale as "stark"
(hence the fictional "Starkfield") and created her subjects
as scarcely articulate and given to long silences.

She also felt that Ethan Frome presented "the first subject
I ever approached with full confidence in its value," even though
many of her friends doubted the project. Ethan Frome is considered
one of Wharton's major works; it was praised as a counterbalance to the
traditional New England "local color" books of the nineteenth
century, which were pastoral, sentimental, and did not address the mental
isolation and tragedy of the rural poor.

The novel was actually started several years before its publication;
it was a writing project, assigned by her French tutor, but its structure,
characters, and theme were very different. When Edith took up the novel
again to publish it, she made dramatic modifications, adding the narrator
as a character and changing Ethan into a much more mature personality.
When completed, the novel first appeared in serial form in "Scribner's
Magazine," running from August to October, 1911. It was published
in book form at the end of the year. It was immediately popular with the
critics and the public. It also proved that Edith Wharton could write
about something beyond New York high society.